Asian Diaspora Essay -- English Literature

Asian Diaspora Asian diaspora, or the personal and cultural implications of leaving one's homeland, is a central and reaccuring theme for Asian American writers. Diaspora is Greek for "the scattering of seeds" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora), and its ancient denotation has taken figurative meaning today as a feeling of seperation and detachment. In both Fae Myenne Ng's Bone and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Leaving Yuba City, a thematic thread of "scattered parts", outsiderness, and otherness link the characters in each, as well as the two seperate works, together. This diaspora affects each generation of immigrants in a slighly different, but no less signficant, way. As an aspect of diasora, W.E.B. DuBois's notion of "double consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk, takes the shape of a personal duality for the characters in Bone and Leaving Yuba City. Their lives looking through DuBois's "veil" creates personal struggle in the character's relationship with America, maintaining two unique cultural identities simultaneously. The characters in Ng's novel Bone work to conceive a third identity, one that maintains old traditions while being "Americanized." This stuggle is not exclusive to the first generation Chinese immigrants, Leon and Mah, but has profoundly impacted their American raised children, Leila, Nina, and Ona. However, the consequences of this conflict is different between the generations. Leon cannot settle into one place but is "suddenly here, suddenly gone" (54). Leon's stray jobs are often on a ship, and Leila concludes that the draw of the "hollow and still center of the ocean" for him is "completion" (150). The cause of Leon's absense, or vacancy of personal wholeness, is his Chinese self trying to chan... ...haracters in Leaving Yuba City and Bone are connected through common seperation from their homeland, or dual selves seen in all generations. This common diaspora creates a unique and painful family dynamic for the Leong family; their incompleteness binds them together. For Sushma in "Leaving Yuba City", she does not feel seperation from homeland, but lives denying a fundamental part of herself, which is much like a homeland. Their is an incongruance or seperation between the person others can see, and the person she really is. Sushma personifies DuBois's "veil." An extremist view of diaspora is "The Maimed Dancing Men", having ghost limbs, and being physically incomplete. Ng and Divakaruni portray the same desperate and painful feelings that come with a seperation from both your homeland, and self, showing these two are inseperable and fundamental to one's wholeness.